Prevent and Reduce
Food Loss

The FOLOU project – Bringing knowledge and consensus to prevent and reduce Food Loss at the primary production stage. Understanding, measuring, training and adopting – aims to prevent and reduce the amount of food intended for human consumption that is eventually lost.

Project co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe programme, 2023 - 2026.

Each year, a substantial amount of food loss (FL) is generated at the primary production stage; FL have negative
impacts on the society, contributing to food insecurity, depleting the environment, generating avoidable GHG emissions
and creating pressure on land and water. Currently, key challenges hampering the reduction of FL are: regulatory
challenges (e.g., exclusion of FL in the EU Commission Decision 2019/1597), technical challenges (e.g., lack of common
measurement methodology, lack of cost-effective measurement tools), scientific challenges (e.g., lack of understanding
of drivers) and social challenges (e.g., lack of skills of the different stakeholders involved). FOLOU is willing to contribute in overcoming these challenges, being the main objective of the project to set up the necessary mechanisms to:

• measure and estimate food losses at primary production stage, encompassing agriculture, aquaculture, and fisheries;
• monitor and report food losses at Member States and European levels;
• assess the magnitude and impact of Food Losses, and identify its key drivers.

Additionally, FOLOU will also work to assure the appropriate knowledge transfer and adoption of the project outcomes by the key targeted stakeholders: primary producers, retailers, consumers, policy makers and researchers. FOLOU will structure its activities in a comprehensive action plan revolving around four levers of change:

1. Understanding by working on collecting and curing food losses available data, by understanding the drivers behind food losses and by assessing the impact of these losses;
2. Measuring by developing new cost-effective tools for the measurement/estimation of food losses and a robust and harmonized quantification methodology for five main commodity groups;
3. Training by providing tailored trainings to different stakeholders;
4. Adopting by preparing recommendations and creating a twinning programme between frontrunner and followers regions.